Pixels: The Art of the iPhone

Susan Thompson

A sunny morning, light pouring through the open door. Kitty basking in the warmth, but seated, not laying down. Why? Perhaps it is mealtime, or she/he thinks it should be meal time. Or maybe he/she has detected an invasion of plutonium android ghost mice from dimension-n in a corner of the kitchen. In any case, what a wonderful image.  Love the warmth of the picture, and how all the apping supports and conveys that warmth, and the ceramic cat behind the door, the spot ToonPaint effects, the meticulous coloration: the earth tones contrasting with the purples and lavender in the siding across the blue walkway that looks like a rushing stream.

On top of all that, I am a cat lady, if you didn’t already know.

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Rebecca Schiller

A beautiful still-life, soft and sensuous. I love the soft taupe/beige/grey palette, as well as the gently textured vignetting. It is wonderful how Rebecca holds the delicate edge of the petal to define its concave space, the smooth interior almost indistinguishable from the background, at the base folding around and clasping the upthrusting stamen. Flowers are sex.

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Shane Martin

This is a perfect capture, apped to perfection. Shane has reduced it to the core elements in stark black and white. The ornate streetlamp in the distance, the railing, the checkered pavilion like a giant chessboard, the woman walking toward us, head slightly cocked in silhouette. The gradated sky in red to light pink is so perfectly appropriate. We have no idea what is beyond the railing. It is a very odd place. In terms of composition, we have one main triangle—lamp, woman, bird—but several others implied to lead our eyes around the image.

Lastly, the bird in rapid flight, wing slightly blurred. Common practice in photo and art composition is that you want people, creatures, whatever, walking/looking/flying into the image, not out of the picture. But  this is wonderful. The bird is exiting rapidly this large and empty space, leaving her alone as, as David Bowie said in The Bewlay Brothers, “We were so turned-on/On the mind-warp pavilion,” under a pink and alien sky.

Super super cool.

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Michael Hill

The spot color works so well here, as does the selective blurring and the hints of  sepia tones in the rest of the image. I like the high contrast effect on her face, shoulder, and arm. Nicely composed shot, very nice, really. It would have been great in simple black-and-white, but it is the spot blues that lift this image—and its implicit eroticism—up another level.

Pretty girl in a bathtub. Beautiful and bold.

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Pepe Larom

Pepe has such a wonderful way with landscapes and shots of country life. Beautiful treatment here, wonderful composition. I just love the gate in the lower right corner, a tiny reminder of our transitory presence in a wild place.

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Irene Oleksiuk

Window box gnomes. A forest nymph with vermilion tresses. The arched bridge over the moss garden. The melting paint over the decaying window frame. The paint spilling off the window trim onto the panes. The fake ivy wreath hanging behind everything on the wall.

This is the land beyond your mind.

As luck would have it, although Jung said there are no coincidences, only synchronicity, I found the perfect video to accompany this wonderful picture. Synchronicity and her handmaiden, serendipity, indeed.

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Karen Divine

I fell in love with Karen Divine and her work the first time I laid eyes on one of her pictures. I think I’ve mentioned this before. As always, I find her intelligence and humor and her strange little creatures and their strange comings and goings most intriguing. Love the colors, the tonal fields.The layering. If I could tie in Rothko somehow, I would, but I can’t. I hope someday there is a big show in a museum and all these wonderful images ring the gallery. The effect would be cumulative and powerful. The pictures are deceptive little stealth bombs.

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Dax Curnew - Preparing For A Rainy Day

Dax does these wonderful collages. As I understand it, he takes pictures of some elements off his computer screen. I am just enjoying the weird humor here: the cloud, the backwards hood over where his face would be, the bizarre pattern on the wallpaper, suggestive of lipstick kisses, and how the bathtub pops out of the image, almost 3-D in the effect. Kinda Dada.

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Shane Martin

This is one of those pictures that says (shouts) “daily pic” the instant I see it.

Let’s start with the capture: it’s beautifully composed, one gentle sloping dune with two cresting peaks in the distance, the rippling sand rolling toward the lower right, the clumps of grass, dead in the desert of no footprints, bereft of water or any other sustenance, shooting up from the ground like sparkler trails.

I love the earthen tonalities, browns and beiges, hints of yellow and orange overtones, and how the grasses stand out in wonderful relief against the corrugated dune. Not sure at all how Shane apped it, but it is perfect. I love the brown vignetting and glow in the sky. Its very clear that this was taken near sundown: we can see the shadows that define the ripples in the sand and the shadows of the grasses splayed across them. I think many would be tempted to desaturate this image, but by not doing so, Shane evokes the living and dying of the eternal desert, the thrust of life itself into the most inhospitable of environments, and the energies of the Earth in a most magical way.

I’ve said it before. I ‘ll say it again. Iphonic art is magical realism: capturing moments of the ephemeral and, through apping, bringing forth the artist’s truth in the process.

Perfect timing. Perfect shot. Perfect apping.

Do I need to say “Well done?”

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Gordon Fraser

I was of course curious as to whom BRANDT was, so I googled “Brandt photographer.” The first results seemed iffy: one did African photos, one was a wedding photographer. For some reason, I had a hunch that Gordon was not paying homage to either of these two. The fourth listing was for Bill Brandt and it said that he “was one of the most important British photographers of the twentieth century. I went to his site and found this gallery. If you look at the second picture in the first row, you may note some similarities.

This simply wonderful figurative work. I know that Gordon has worked on his lighting a lot. Two years ago, in our first correspondence about shooting nudes (he had—I think—the only nude in the very first gallery showing of iphonic art, the one we did at the Giorgi in February of 2010), he stressed to me the importance of light, especially with the limitations of the iPhone as a camera.

You can see the results of his work here. Stunning.

She is not in peaceful contemplation, as she appeared to me on first glance, but, rather, intense reflection. She’s hunched over. We see, barely, her downcast face, her arms not in naturally restful positions, a glimpse of her right foot under her left thigh, highlights on a cascade of wavy hair, of fragmented curvatures of the feminine form. This is not a flattering picture, though she is very pretty, and young. It is instead beautiful, for it contains vestiges of the wound we find implicit in all works of true beauty.

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